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If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

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Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#281

Post by smsm42 »

humanrebar wrote: post #277
smsm42 wrote: post #101

I love the show, but there's a lot of things that Silicon Valley is that it does not cover. It's not the fault of the show - it probably would be much worse if it did. But some aspects of SV - like how much it is integrated into the big politics and yet how much they try to downplay it and make it look like their behemoth companies are just young and agile rebels playing this new Internet thing, as if it were the ear…

> ...how office politics often becomes more important than tech... Basically all the Hooli scenes are about that. Also just about the entire careers of Big Head, Jack Barker, and Denpok the "spiritual advisor".

In Hooli there's one big player - Benson - who is erratic and egomaniacal, and everybody else does what he says. He is a personification of a jerk (I mean, look at his signature!) and serves as a kind of super-villain that is the source of all evil. But usually there's no super-villain, there's just "culture" and everybody is playing by the set of rules that nobody in particular invented.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#283

Post by wwweston »

slivym wrote: post #3

It's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example.

BBT is a great foil for SV. It's caricature vs satire.

BBT is outsiders laughing at the image of a nerd archetype many have in their head. It can be entertaining; it can tell you a lot about their relationship with that archetype. But as with all caricature, the distorted image can be a little ouchy.

SV satirizes insider territory with surprising resolution. It can be entertaining; it can tell people a lot about the culture. Where it's ouchy, it's ouchy because the truth can be painful as well as funny.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#284

Post by rhino369 »

Stratoscope wrote: post #202

So how does one subscribe to this show without subscribing to HBO? I looked at their website and don't see anything else I would want to watch. I really want to watch Silicon Valley, but that's the only thing HBO offers that I'm interested in. Can I buy just this one show from them?

Should be on iTunes or Amazon for 3 bucks an episode.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#285

Post by justifier »

> Even a huge believer in technology like me has to laugh when some character talks about how they’re going to change the world with an app that tells you whether what you’re eating is a hot dog or not.

sorry bill but one could argue in a round about way that andrej karpathy did do just that ;P

the hot dog identifying app is one of my favourite examples of how spot on the show is

here(o) is a question i asked to one of the show's technical consultants whether the choice of 'not hotdog' was a reference to one of karpathy's early demos(i||ii)

timanglade> Ha seems like a fun coincidence.

(o) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639161 the yt link is now a dead link.. use either of the below

(i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465 ; Title: Deep Learning for Computer Vision (Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI) ; Desc: The talks at the Deep Learning School on September 24/25, 2016 were amazing. I clipped out individual talks from the full live streams and provided links to each below in case that's useful for people who want to watch specific talks several times (like I do).

(ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787 ; timestamped from the full stream; Title: Bay Area Deep Learning School Day 1 at CEMEX auditorium, Stanford ; Desc: Day 1 of Bay Area Deep Learning School featuring speakers Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Andrew Ng. ;

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#286

Post by [deleted] »

blocked_again wrote: post #13
slivym wrote: post #3

It's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example.

Pardon my ignorance but what did big bang theory got wrong?

[deleted]

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#287

Post by Stratoscope »

rhino369 wrote: post #284
Stratoscope wrote: post #202

So how does one subscribe to this show without subscribing to HBO? I looked at their website and don't see anything else I would want to watch. I really want to watch Silicon Valley, but that's the only thing HBO offers that I'm interested in. Can I buy just this one show from them?

Should be on iTunes or Amazon for 3 bucks an episode.

Thank you! I should have thought of checking Amazon.

I just bought Season 1. It took 10 seconds and cost 10 bucks, and now I can watch them at my leisure. Exactly what I was looking for. :-)

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#288

Post by adtac »

selimthegrim wrote: post #170

The Lena easter egg in plain sight was amusing during a few episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

I don't think that was a easter egg given that they work on compression. It's a standard test for image compression, after all.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#289

Post by humanrebar »

rchaud wrote: post #126
blimey74 wrote: post #70

If you like Silicon Valley check out The IT Crowd, also equally hilarious take on the world of IT.

Aside from the completely overused line "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?", the show has almost nothing to do with IT. Apart from a couple of IT-related plotlines, most of the episodes take place outside their office.

> ...the show has almost nothing to do with IT.

"The Internet" device. All the tech illiterate coworkers. Jen's imposter syndrome. Moss's on-the-spectrum reactions. Online dating when it was still nerdy. Novelty websites. Viral cultural events.

But it wasn't exclusively geek humor. There were broader episodes involving Jen's and Roy's romantic lives too.

Re: If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley

#290

Post by smsm42 »

waivek wrote: post #127
smsm42 wrote: post #101

I love the show, but there's a lot of things that Silicon Valley is that it does not cover. It's not the fault of the show - it probably would be much worse if it did. But some aspects of SV - like how much it is integrated into the big politics and yet how much they try to downplay it and make it look like their behemoth companies are just young and agile rebels playing this new Internet thing, as if it were the ear…

They did do an episode on the monocultural aspect in the latest season. Richard unintentionally "outs" a guy as being Christian and some of the programmers feel uncomfortable working with a Christian. The guy later pulls Richard aside saying that he wasn't "openly Christian". The whole episode was hilarious.

Oh yes, I forgot about that one.
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